NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Quanterix reported after the close of the market on Wednesday that its first quarter revenues were up 64 percent year over year.
The company posted Q1 revenues of $12.3 million, up from $7.5 million in Q1 2018 and above the consensus Wall Street estimate of $10.2 million.
Its Q1 product revenues rose 102 percent to $9.5 million in Q1 2018 from $4.7 million in Q1 2018, with consumables sales up 124 percent and instrument sales up 70 percent. Service and other revenues rose 11 percent to $2.8 million from $2.5 million in the prior-year first quarter.
The firm's Q1 net loss widened to $9.4 million from $7.2 million a year ago. It didn't provide a loss-per-share figure.
On a conference call following release of its financial results, Quanterix President, Chairman, and CEO Kevin Hrusovsky noted continued uptake of the company's Simoa technology in neurology and oncology research along with strong growth from its pharma and biotech customers.
Hrusovsky said that 77 percent of the company's business was in the neurology space, which has been its traditional area of focus. More recently, Quanterix has begun moving into oncology, and this space accounted for 17 percent of its business in Q1.
Key to Quanterix's oncology ambitions is its new SP-X instrument, which allows for the higher levels of multiplexing the company believes will make it attractive to oncology. While Quanterix originally targeted the SP-X for launch in Q2 2019, it released it ahead of schedule at the end of Q1 and has placed several instruments, Hrusovsky said.
He added that the company expects to launch its HD-X instrument, an updated version of the company's original HD-1 analyzer, by the end of the year. He said Quanterix continues to invest in improving the sensitivity of its platforms with the goal of achieving a one hundredfold boost in sensitivity by 2021. He said it has managed a tenfold improvement with existing prototypes.
Hrusovsky said that the company has now seen two consecutive quarters of "very rapid growth" in instrument sales after several years of relatively flat instrument sales growth, and that this, in turn, has driven consumables growth. He said roughly two-thirds of the growth in instrument sales had been driven by new customers, with the launch of benchtop instruments in the last year allowing it to make inroads into academia as well as the Asia market.
Hrusovsky said the instrument sales growth was proving out the company's strategy of focusing on driving use of its technology in peer-reviewed publications to identify potential biomarkers, which would then become the focus of additional studies that require the Simoa technology, driving instrument growth and consumables sales.
He cited as examples recent studies identifying the protein LIF as a potential marker of progression in pancreatic cancer and the protein Nfl as a potential early marker for neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer's disease. In total, 61 peer-reviewed publications using the Simoa technology were published during the quarter, Hrusovsky said.
Quanterix's R&D spending during the quarter was up 3 percent to $3.7 million from $3.6 million in Q1 2018. Its SG&A expenses rose 70 percent to $10.4 million from $6.1 million the year before.
The company ended the quarter with $34 million in cash and cash equivalents.
In Friday morning trade on Nasdaq, Quanterix shares were up 5 percent to $24.43.